Windows 7 Upgrade Killing Some Machines

The launch of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, has seen the company drive for in-place upgrades over clean installs, but now it’s looking like some of those upgrades aren’t working out quite as planned.

According to TomsHardware, the upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7can fail fairly catastrophically, leaving users with hardware that’s effectively unusable. According to a post on the Microsoft support board for Windows 7, one user ran into an infinite reboot cycle, interspersed with a message to inform him that his upgrade had failed.

The user then goes on to say that, “My laptop is now in what seems to be a loop of restarting and trying to restore the files.” He hastens to add that all of the copies of Windows used in the process were legitimate (where for some others encountering difficulty it had been suggested that illicit versions of Windows may be to blame).

For now there seems to be fairly little connection between the various users who’ve encountered the problem. Some are having issues with retail discs, others with downloaded and burned ISOs (though with legit licenses). The real issue though, is that the in-place upgrade option essentially feels like an option for those who don’t want to go through the tedious business of making a full backup, and it could well be the case that that’s cost these users their data…

In a world where the internet can turn any vocal minority into an apparent majority, just how Microsoft responds to the issue will be very important. For now though, this seems to be a fairly isolated issue. Hopefully your Windows 7 upgrades went a little better 🙂